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X-Plane - An Obsession For Realism

Posted by simoniker on from the taxi-take-off-cabin-lights dept.

caseih writes "Popular Science is running an article on Austin Meyer, the creator of the popular X-Plane flight simulator. Although not an open source project, X-Plane has a devoted community of flight enthusiasts and developers who are striving to make it the most realistic flight simulator ever. In fact, flight characteristics are calculated in real time from aircraft design data, not static tables like MS Flight Simulator. PopSci has a neat picture showing X-Plane calculating the lift-drag vectors in real-time across an aircraft. Meyer's quest for realism in his simulations dominates the development and use of X-Plane."

3 of 376 comments (clear)

  1. Phew! by bitfoam · · Score: 4, Funny
    "Popular Science is running an article on Austin Meyer, the creator of the popular X-Plane flight simulator."

    For a moment there, I thought this was a story on Mike Meyers and his next Austin Powers movie, featuring a futuristic X-Plane thingy that spoofs Moonraker.

    I'm honestly not sure whether to be disappointed or not...

  2. Free as in too much BEER by elrond1999 · · Score: 5, Funny
    It's hard to imagine Microsoft coming home drunk one night from a party and accidentally uploading its entire source code, as Meyer did a few years back.


    It was almost open source :)
  3. Re:In contrast, Salon.com's "Air Osama" article by rtaylor · · Score: 4, Funny

    Why don't Americans read their own literature and
    need Russian to remind them?

    Russians have longer attention spans than Amer... That dog has a puffy tail! Hee hee hee hee! Here puff! Here puff!

    --
    Rod Taylor